The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

March 21, 2013

Durs Grünbein

Durs Grünbein (DDR/now Germany)

1962

Born in Dresden, after World War II part of the
German Democratic Republic, Durs Grübein came into the limelight with his first
volume of 1988, Grauzone Morgens.
This book spoke of an entire generation, what has been called “the ghetto of a
lost generation,” a generation born and raised in the false utopia of Communist
East Germany, yet having to face the problems of the new reunified Germany.

His second collection of poems, Schädelbasislektion,
was published in 1991, and others, equally renowned, soon followed, including Falten und Fallen (1964) and Nach den Satiren (1999). Grünbein also
wrote two books of essays.

The poet has received numerous prizes, including the Leonce and Lena
Prize of 1989, the Literature Prize of Stadt Marburg (1992), the Peter Huchel
Prize and the Georg Büchner Prize (both in 1995) and the Literaturpreis de
Osterfetspiele Salzburg in 2000. He was a fellow at the Villa Aurora in Los
Angeles in 1997.

He poems have been extensively translated, including a large collection
into English, Ashes for Breakfast
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).